Tag Archives: YouTube

From Murrow To Mediocrity…

The Fall From Grace At CBS

The Ed Sullivan Theater in New York City, home of the Late Show, where David Letterman delivered his mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa, admitting to sexual indiscressions with staff members (photo from Wikimedia Commons)

Executives at CBS must regret the day they lured David Letterman away from NBC. And the venerable Ed Sullivan Theater in New York City, where CBS tapes the Letterman show, has been forever sullied by the scandal that hit the news Thursday. CBS began broadcasting from CBS-TV “Studio 50” in 1936, and renamed it the Ed Sullivan Theater in 1967. The Ed Sullivan show was broadcast from there during it’s 23-year run, from 1948 thru 1971.

In the 1970’s, about the time that David Letterman was a weatherman on an Indianapolis, Indiana television station, we were working for a company in New York City that sold equipment to broadcasters. They did business with CBS, and on one occasion our work took us to the Ed Sullivan Theater. We entered that building in awe. We felt extremely privileged to be in that space, where some of the most historic broadcasts in the history of television originated from. Today however, we would be embarrassed to be seen entering the studio where the Beatles made their U.S. debut, and where virtually every notable performer or group from that era appeared, many of them multiple times.

Ed Sullivan would cringe if he heard what David Letterman admitted to this past Thursday, while standing on the same stage that Sullivan’s shows were broadcast from. Ed Sullivan was so squeaky clean that it was commonplace for him to ask performers to change objectionable lyrics in the songs they performed on the Ed Sullivan show. Performers that refused to clean up their lyrics would not be broadcast, and those that reneged on their promise to sanitize their lyrics (remember that this was live television), were never invited back to the Ed Sullivan show again.

This past Thursday, in what can only be described as one of the most bizarre broadcasts of the Letterman show (or any television show, for that matter), Letterman delivered his mea culpa, admitting to his sexual indiscretions, to an audience of people who were laughing like hyenas. Apparently, the audience didn’t know what to make of the confession, and assumed it was part of his comedy routine. Here’s an article published by the New York Daily News on Friday, which identifies a woman who worked for David Letterman, who they believe is involved in the scandal. In any case, Letterman’s broadcast confession certainly gives a whole new meaning to the term “Worldwide Pants”. You can probably find the confession on YouTube and elsewhere, but we aren’t going to link to it, since it seems that CBS has been asking YouTube to pull any excerpts people have been posting from the show, due to copyright infringement, and, no doubt, severe embarrassment. Ya know, maybe CBS should have never broadcast it in the first place.

In the 1970’s Watergate scandal, Richard Nixon had his infamous 18- minute gap on the White House tapes. Similarly, in the Letterman scandal, CBS has redacted the ten-minute mea culpa segment of David Letterman’s monologue from the official copy that CBS posted on YouTube (read this NY Times article about the missing Letterman segment).

As an aside, we think it’s worth noting that technology like cellphones, digital cameras, the VCR, DVDs, computers, the Internet and websites like YouTube have a way of changing the status quo, and making existing law moot in many cases. As many individuals and corporations have learned over the last few years, it is largely an exercise in futility to try and have something that has been posted on the Web taken down. The harder you try to quash something, whether a photo, a video, an MP3 file or a point of view, the faster it propagates. Remove it from one website, and it springs up in 100 other places. The battle to protect intellectual property (IP) has been made infinitely more difficult as technology has made it a trivial matter to make high quality copies of materials such as music, movies, photos, etc. Two events in particular stick out in our mind; The introduction of VCRs in the late 1970’s, which had the entertainment industry scared to death about illegal recording of television shows, and the advent of music sharing websites such as Napster. Blogs, personal websites, and the fact that virtually everyone can now have a “printing press” in their home has changed the publishing and newspaper businesses forever. Organizations have learned that a different mindset is necessary to survive. If you can’t beat them, join them. As an example of this consider the fact that every major U.S. daily newspaper that has managed to survive also has a website. Newspapers have even begun scrapping their paper editions, becoming Internet-only news outlets, a la The Huffington Post (see this NYTimes article about The Seattle Post-Intelligencer going Internet-only). But we digress.

If we were running CBS, the Letterman show would be pulled faster than you can say “Top Ten List”, but for financial reasons, we doubt CBS will pull the show. Moral and ethical standards are simply not what they were when William S. Paley was running CBS. Certainly not at CBS, and not anywhere else in broadcasting, or society in general. If Letterman can continue to do well in the ratings, his job is probably secure. But we expect to see CBS getting hit with lawsuits from Letterman staffers, who will say that his conduct created a hostile work environment.

Gee Whiz, I must be psychic or something. Just a few days ago, I posted a comment on this blog that CompUSA, a chain of computer stores in the United States, would soon bite the dust.I just stumbled across this article on Reuters and this article on cbsnews that confirms that CompUSA is on it’s way out. According to Reuters, the chain has been sold to the liquidation outfit Gordon Brothers. They will be closing the remaining 103 CompUSA stores in early 2008. No surprise, actually, since CompUSA closed most of it’s stores earlier this year. In recent years, CompUSA was controlled by Mexican businessman Carlos Slim Helu, reportedly the richest person on the planet, even wealthier than Bill Gates or Warren Buffet (see this Fortune article on Carlos Slim).

Have you ever seen a tree that was pruned to death? After a certain amount of pruning, the death of the tree is inevitable, because it can’t absorb enough sunlight to survive. So too with computer retailers (or any business, I suspect). I was quite certain that it was simply a matter of time before CompUSA was history. That time appears to be at hand.

I don’t have an MBA. I’m not an accountant or a retail executive. I’m a computer geek. But I know mismanagement when I see it, and CompUSA was a poster child for piss-poor management. I can’t tell you how many times I went into one of several local CompUSA stores to purchase sale items and came up empty-handed. So, I would walk over to one of the computer terminals that the sales staff used, and I would enter the SKU of the item I was looking for. Nine times out of ten, the computer showed that the store had stock on hand, sometimes a large quantity, but it was nowhere to be found. A few times, when I would pester one of the salespeople to go check the stockroom, they would usually find the item in the back, and bring one out for me. Sometimes, they wouldn’t want to bother because they did not have any confidence in the inventory quantities shown in the computer. Maybe that was just an excuse because they were lazy, or maybe their inventory tracking really was inaccurate. Sometimes they would say it was in the store somewhere, but they didn’t know where.

What a joke. I mean, if you go through the trouble of ordering inventory, printing up a sale circular, and shipping the item to your stores, but you don’t follow through and put the stuff out on your sales floor so it will sell, you don’t belong in business. This wasn’t a rare occurance. It was the status quo at CompUSA. I am confident that if you put me in charge of CompUSA, I could have done a better job. Who knows, maybe I could have saved them. I think part of the problem was that the chain had changed ownership years ago. When any business gets sold, especially if the new owners are investors and/or absentee owners who don’t know the business, look out. With some very rare exceptions, nobody will do as good a job running the business as the person or people that founded it. They don’t have the same passion. If the business fails, they’ll just move on to something else. There’s little devotion or emotional attachment, because it’s not their baby.

The sales people at CompUSA were rarely motivated. I suppose they didn’t earn enough to get real excited about their jobs. The store management was pitiful. There were a couple of employees at the CompUSA I frequented the most who did work hard, and I felt very badly for them losing their jobs when that store closed.

I recently posted this article about rebate scams. I had more than my share of problems with rebates on items I purchased at CompUSA. I complained a number of times, both to the CompUSA store where I purchased the items, and to their customer service phone number. There were many rebates on items I purchased at CompUSA that I got cheated out of, and never received.

You know, to be honest, CompUSA was never my favorite computer store anyway. I preferred the Computer City chain, which closed circa 1998 or 1999, if memory serves me correctly. Computer City was purchased by CompUSA. They closed some Computer City stores and turned the rest into CompUSA stores. Egghead Software was also pretty good, although they operated much smaller stores and did not carry a lot of hardware. Today, Egghead is strictly an online retailer. The newest chain to open in my neck of the woods is Micro Center, which started out in Ohio, and has expanded to almost two dozen stores. Micro Center is a pretty cool store. It looks like there are a lot more good deals to be had there, and they claim that they have prices as good as you’ll find on the web. They sell brand name (Dell, IBM, Compaq, etc.) brown-box “refurbished” computer systems alongside their big selection of new systems. They cater to system builders and gamers and have a pretty large Apple department. They also have a nice computer book and magazine section, nearly as large as you’ll find at Barnes & Noble or Borders Books. On several occasions I’ve picked up some bargain-priced (not-current edition) but otherwise new books for under five bucks each. They even have free Internet access kiosks, so you can comparison shop without leaving the store! There’s little in the way of computer hardware that they don’t carry. If there’s a Micro Center near you, you have little reason left to buy stuff online.

Life goes on. Other computer retailers will come and go, to be sure. Perhaps my opinion of CompUSA will mellow as the memories fade to black.